Sep 28, 2016

Excerpt from page 116."More and more, mass-production techniques change our ways of living and thinking without the consent of traditional avant-garde - the artists and intellectuals and their patrons. Innovation - or change of style - now enters society horizontally from mass-production industry and its ad-men, with feedback into the old fine arts.In this situation it is necessary to change the whole focus of fine-art architectural activities; to produce powerfully distinct alternatives.........The relationship between the means and the architecture is the same as that of words of common speech with poetry. In the same way, once these means have been used distinctly, the 'anonymous' becomes specific, has been given special meaning........It is possible that a future architecture will be expendable and that an urban discipline of a few fixed points and a scatter of change will develop. In such an architecture the shortness of life can allow of solutions in which the first process is the last process."Smithson, Alison Margaret., and Peter Smithson. Changing the Art of Inhabitation. London: Artemis, 1994. Print.

"Because the beauty of the human body is that it hasn’t a single muscle which doesn’t serve its purpose; that there’s not a line wasted; that every detail of it fits one idea, the idea of a man and the life of a man. Will you tell me why, when it comes to a building, you don’t want it to look as if it had any sense or purpose, you want to choke it with trimmings, you want to sacrifice its purpose to its envelope – not knowing why you even want that envelope?”

The structure reduces to the most minimal elements and the pieces that once were the dominant form instead suggest new spaces to move through and interact with. The box has finally been exploded and its remaining elements now form new social interactions and create new spaces.

"Inventing a plane is not only inventing the crash but also inventing the breakdown. A jet engine is an amazing thing, but it’s also sensitive to birds, to volcanic ash… So you go from the plane that can go really fast to the plane that can’t fly at all. Whether it’s because of terrorism and being scared, or because of the volcano and it being too risky, or something new tomorrow, you can’t innovate without creating some damage. It’s so obvious that being obliged to repeat it shows the extent to which we are alienated by the propaganda of progress."

Sep 22, 2016

Lina Bo Bardi has been an inspiration throughout the studio process, thus far. She believed that Architecture was centered around the human experience and should encourage creativity, speculation and interpretation. Bardi's chair is a masterpiece. It transformed the way one could sit, encouraging a relaxed posture. Much like her architecture, it placed human interaction at the heart of the design.

This studio's goal is to forget what had been known and strive for the future through research, discovery and innovation. Utilizing a mindset similar to Lina's, we may just be able to revolutionize the way people sit, sleep and live.

Sep 20, 2016

Fueled initially by the thoughtless energy of the purely quantitative, Bigness has been, for nearly a century, a condition almost without thinkers, a revolution without program.

Delirious New York implied a latent “Theory of Bigness” based on five theorems.

1. Beyond a certain critical mass, a building becomes a Big Building. Such a mas can no longer be controlled by a single architectural gesture, or even by any combination of architectural gestures. This impossibility triggers the autonomy of its parts, but that is not the same as fragmentation: the parts remain committed to the whole.

2. The elevator-with its potential to establish mechanical rather than architectural connections-and its family of related inventions render null and void the classical repertoire of architecture. Issues of composition, scale, proportion, detail are now moot.

The “art” of architecture is useless in Bigness.

3. In Bigness, the distance between core and envelope increases to the point where the facade can no longer reveal what happens inside. The Humanist expectation of “honesty” is doomed: interior and exterior architectures become separate projects, one dealing with the instability of programmatic and iconographic needs, the other-agent of disinformation-offering the city the apparent stability of an object.

Where architecture reveals, Bigness perplexes; Bigness transforms the city from a summation of certainties into an accumulation of mysteries. What you see is no longer what you get.

4. Through size alone, such buildings enter an amoral domain, beyond good or bad.

Their impact is independent of their quality.

5. Together, all these breaks- with scale, with architectural composition, with tradition, with transparency, with ethics-imply the final, most radical break: Bigness is no longer part of any urban tissue.

"Beauty is the splendor of the truth. Art is the means given to man to produce beauty; art is thus the pursuit of beauty in the truth and by the truth. In the arts of imitation, truth is nature: in the arts of creation, in architecture most of all, truth is less easily defined: nevertheless for me I would translate it by one word: consciousness. If for the painter and the sculpted truth is in the external world, for us it resides within ourselves."-Julien Guadet-Quote from Éléments et théorie de l'architecture; cours professé à l'Ecole nationale et spéciale des beaux-arts, 1910.

Sep 18, 2016

"Deconstruction: dismantling our excessive loyalty to any idea and learning to see the aspects of the truth that might lie buried in its opposite.""Aporia: impass or puzzlement.""Logocentrism: an overhasty naive devotion to reason, logic, and clear definition underpinned by a faith in language as the natural and best way to communicate."

Sep 7, 2016

Contemporary architecture needs to be
upgraded. The relationship with our furniture, dwellings, and city is currently
static, although all the technological advancements that surround us.
Disruptive technologies such as iPhone have a huge impact in the way we pace
our lives nowadays; in this context, can we design a more responsive
architecture? This is the challenge that we face nowadays: creating disruptive architectures, providing us funnier, more intimate, and useful relationships
with our built environment.